A stripe less ordinary

Ok, so my first time out as a Jam Ref went less than spectacularly. I was all over the place focus-wise and I forgot to to do a whole load of things like actually check for legal passes …… keep score ……

Yeah, it wasn’t a good day.

Second time out as JR was yesterday in a mixed scrim. Pleased to say it went a lot better. We were short 2 refs, so had to work with 2 OPR and 1 IPR along with the 2 JR’s. Pretty well straight from the first whistle things ran pretty smoothly for me. I found my focus was much better and that I could almost sit back and take in more of my surroundings instead of panicking.

There were a couple of procedural issues that cropped up where, fortunately, my more experienced JR partner swooped in to sort things out.

There was also a ‘fun’ occurance where I followed my white jammer into the pack and followed the black pivot out of it……. That was ‘interesting’! :/

I think my biggest handicap at the moment is coming from a league where I’m the only experienced ref. There was a lot of communication going on between the ref crew yesterday that I missed out on. A ref who is used to working with a crew would have known what was going on and where communications would have occurred. I didn’t so got a little confused when calls were being passed to me about my jammer which lead to me not calling a couple of penalties as I wasn’t entirely sure what was being passed to me.


My impact metric is also something that I need more work on. There was a lot of forearm / elbow contact happening yesterday but not a whole lot that was minor/major worthy from my jammer. I called a few penalties on these areas but there were a few which left me thinking … ‘Hmm, WAS that a forearm?’ When in doubt - don’t shout out.


On the whole, I was happy with yesterday. I don’t think I made any major cockups on the scoring. I found I was able to keep track of points that should have been scored through skaters being in the bin or having not made it to the track. Where I did make mistakes, I found I was able to work through the error in my head and correct my score tracker between jams. My focus and communication to my score tracker was much better than last time. I was able to clearly communicate the points to her as well as confirm them. Last time, I was just frantically waving my fingers around and not really checking in.

I’m really looking forward to the ref boot camp next month. I think it’s coming at just the right time for me as a lot of it focuses on …. focus, which I think is my weakest area right now.


Raaaaah! Jam is ONNNN!! :D


Z#1039